Conformal Metrics with Constant Q-Curvature

Abstract

We consider the problem of varying conformally the metric of a four dimensional manifold in order to obtain constant Q-curvature. The problem is variational, and solutions are in general found as critical points of saddle type. We show how the problem leads naturally to consider the set of formal barycenters of the manifold.

Keywords

• Q-curvature
• geometric PDEs
• variational methods
• min-max schemes